Category: Difficulty to opportunity

I’m praying for the Ukrainian nation where last century’s atrocities want to barge into this century. I pray we learn from history!  In honor of my Ukrainian roots, I’m sharing a small tribute I wrote a few years ago to my paternal grandmother who fled from Ukraine over a hundred years ago as a 16 year-old!

“There is no success without sacrifice. If you succeed without sacrifice it is because someone has suffered before you. If you sacrifice without success it is because someone will succeed after.”

Adoniram Judson

 With the arrival of our first grandchild in the year of 2019, I’m being drawn to the past and to the future.  I’m zooming out to take a look at this phenomenon called life.  My little part, my story, is a drop in a huge generational wave of people who have gone before, of whose lives I am somehow a benefactor. What do we need to learn from the vast humanity that went before us?  Who do we need to “meet” from our pasts?  Will those who come after us, learn from us?  Will they realize how we struggled to find our way and prayed for them to find the Way?

I’m intrigued with my grandparents and how little I know of them.  It was a different and distant world they occupied compared to now.  I’m especially drawn to my paternal grandmother, Baba, we called her, for the fleeting moments we knew her.  So young she took on a new world, a new identity, an incredible adventure along with the certain hardship and suffering of an immigrant.

Having lived most of my adult life on the side of the world she came from, I gasp in relief that she left when she did, seeing now the aftermath of the soul-draining and humanity-stripping life brought about by communism.  I live among them in the leftovers and rubble of an ideology gone bad.

This is a small tribute to Mary Hutsko who came to the USA from the Ukraine in 1911 at the age of sixteen.

“In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, mass emigration was also taking place from western Ukraine to the Americas. Rural overpopulation, poverty, malnutrition, a high mortality rate, and unemployment were among the factors that precipitated outmigration at that time. Also, at work were pull factors, including stories of great economic opportunities in the West – often exaggerated by the shipping agents who recruited immigrants, primarily for work in Pennsylvania’s coal mines.”

 “The emigrants, predominantly poor peasants and young single people, hoped to earn enough money to pay for the voyage and all their existing debts, and to save enough to return to Ukraine, buy land, and establish themselves as farmers. Later, most emigrants expected to settle permanently in the United States…

Meanwhile, the immigration policies of the host countries at that time were liberal since labor was in great demand for industry in the United States.”  “Even in their own homeland they fought hard to preserve their native language, religious beliefs, customs and traditions that were constantly being threatened by foreign domination.”

Ukrainian immigration: A Study in EthnicSurvival* Ann Lencyk Pawliczko United Nations Population Division

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.2050-411X.1994.tb00104.x

I imagine her

with the fascination of a young girl, along with the terror of heading across an ocean she knew nothing about, arriving at the port, stepping tremblingly aboard the crowded steerage of the ship with who-knows-what kind of provisions. Fleeing demise, dreaming of dignity, perhaps she was full of hope and fearful courage, at the same time carrying the disillusionment of life as it was. She had no idea the sacrifice and battering that life would bring; the grind and seeming futility.

“Before World War I, 98 percent of Ukrainians settled in the northeastern states, with 70 percent in Pennsylvania.”  Read more: https://www.everyculture.com/multi/Sr-Z/Ukrainian-Americans.html#ixzz5lvXegwkM

Landing at the inspection station of Ellis Island, as exhilarating as it might have been, surely had its cold stares and strange languages to face.  Some were sent back upon arrival.  I wonder how long she had to wait, what kind of welcome she had, what prejudices and anxieties she had to push through.

I’m told she worked as a nanny for a while, then married.  Life was grueling, and work for my grandfather in the coal mine was abusive.  My father, the tenth child, doesn’t remember a conversation with his father who died young of black lung disease.  He worked twelve hours a day in the mines of Eastern Pennsylvania and smoked a pipe after work at night.   Their lives were completely poured out for the next generation.

Although my grandparents were distant and mystery to me, I want to thank them.  Though is seems trite, I want to tell them it was worth it.  Surely, they had hopes and dreams and capabilities.  They certainly accomplished much having inaugurated life in a new land; having unobtrusively survived the Great Depression. But the seeds of their personal aspirations were regretfully buried in the soil of the future, watered with unseen tears.  Look at what they started! Look at what has become because they braved the voyage into the luring and looming unknown!  A diverse wave of Ukrainian and half-Ukrainian descendants. Those seeds cracking, bursting, sprouting and fruitful in their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.  But they didn’t get to see it.

Atrocities and hidden history still peek out of fragmented lives here in the post-Soviet rubble; betraying underlying thought patterns amid floundering newfound freedoms. I’m sure there was silent suffering in our grandparents. The past stays with us for a long time.  It’s in our bones and our DNA, but it will soon be a distant memory.  I wish I knew more. What will my grandchildren know of me in 100 years?!

When I asked some relatives what her life might have been like, my cousin replied “What do you think it was like?!  She had 10 kids!?”  🙂  I’m told she loved to cook and garden and I understand church was a big part of their community life.  How much we have gained from these unknowing valiant ones! They paved a way for us to live our lives as they wished they could have lived theirs. Let’s not forget that.

Jackie (Hutsko) Scott

“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”

Neil Postman

“The fear of God is the beginning…”

Proverbs 1:7

Our little family had just moved to a foreign country that had recently experienced devastating loss. My husband was venturing to start a business to help people learn how to do that honorably in a place where it had been considered immoral. We hired services to help us register the business, later to find out they were corrupt.

Our first clue was when they came to deliver the registration papers at the cold, leftover Soviet apartment that we used for an office. Oleg brought Tajir along with him. He was a Genghis Khan-looking fellow, the power lifter type with close-cropped hair. Oleg sat down and went through the papers then gargled, “I want you to meet Tajir. He’ll be your guard.” Immediately Dan suspected what was going on and said, “I don’t think we’ll need him.”

“Well,” he threatened “bad things can happen…”

Taken aback and scrambling to fathom this new culture Dan asked,

“If we were to hire him what would we pay?”

“We’ll come to an agreement…a percentage.”

“A percentage of what?! We’re just trying to get off the ground. We’re in the red!” Not given easily to intimidation, Dan continued, “If we need a guard, I’ll let you know and he’ll work for us.”

Some days later, the office door squeaked open and there was Tajir. He began to show up unannounced, making a habit of presumptuously walking into the office without knocking. Dan would greet him, tell him business was slow, practice his Russian, offer him tea, and ask him if he wanted to study the Bible. Tajir had a hard time keeping his smile under wraps. He was really a teddy bear caught in this mafia mix. After a few weeks Oleg showed up and asked Dan why he wasn’t paying Tajir. Dan said, “If we want him, we will hire him.”

He began to threaten. “Well, you have a wife and children…” he retorted. Of course this took it to another level. Dan showed them to the door scarcely able to disguise his anger. In the post Soviet power vacuum these types found ways of dealing with foreigners that clashed with our ideas of how to do ethical business. Dan asked him to leave.

Fear. It came closer to me the day I heard about this! I recognized it, felt its power. I knew I had to make a choice. We had been warned that living here would be difficult and dangerous. As I wrestled, I had to lean on the rock bottom belief that God is over all. I threw this fear like a hot potato to the God who wanted to show himself in this forsaken land. I had been working on taking my fears to Him rather than denying or just bottling them as I had done over the years. I felt its talons wanting to work into my mind and heart and had to deal with it for days. I didn’t want to live in fear and knew the paralysis of it to keep us in ruts. I hated ruts but often found myself in them.

Our local business partner began to worry greatly about not accommodating Oleg and the day she brought it up, Dan happened to be wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Fear Not’! But since it was winter and the city heat hadn’t been turned on yet, he had his winter coat on as he huddled over his desk. As he saw fear grasp *Cvyeta’s face, Dan remembered what he was wearing and yanked off his coat to show her the verse written on his shirt, a take-off of the then popular ‘No Fear’ logo.   Isaiah 41:10 “Fear not for I am with you… “     She was given an ear-full about this God who was over all; much greater than this wanna-be mafia thug, and though she strained to listen, she still felt we needed to appease. Being new in the culture, Dan decided to let her call the shots on this one. She called Oleg’s office and made a plan to meet them to see what needed to be done. A meeting date was set.

The day came for the meeting and two local tour guides, inquiring about our new company, happened to come in for a consultation. Time got away as they discussed business. The phone rang. Sofia, answering the phone, looked worried and mouthed to Dan, “We’re supposed to be at Oleg’s office!” Dan asked her to reschedule, because we had unexpected clients arrive.

After this, Tajir inexplicably stopped showing up and we didn’t hear from Oleg for weeks. Another co-worker came in one day having seen the secretary who worked in Oleg’s office. Remembering that the dreaded meeting hadn’t yet happened, he asked her about Oleg, and she said abruptly, “Oleg’s dead”!

“What?! …what happened?

“He had a heart attack.” She announced. His partner was running a pyramid scheme and fled the country with $25,000 and the police arrested Oleg saying he was responsible for the money. He had a heart attack on the spot and died. Wow.

A year or so later Dan ran into Tajir. He asked him how it was going. Dan said, “Business is still slow…” Tajir smiled and waved.

God deals strongly with those who mess with his own! Sometimes a lot sooner than we expect!

If I grapple with a fear yet realize that there’s something much greater than it, then I can work through small fears that keep me from real life. Sometimes we don’t even know what those fears are, but not identifying them keeps us in ruts and builds walls. So I have to stop and identify the fear that’s grabbing me and admit it and begin taking it to the One we should fear above all.

~

What do you think you are most afraid of? Why? What are the fears behind those fears?

Think it through, if what you fear happens, then what? Can we go with God to our worst fears and talk them through?

If so, with time, perhaps we can break the inertia they bring and not give in to them or let them control us.

“The eye of the Lord is on those who fear him….”

Psalm 33:18

*name changed

“A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offense.”

Prov. 19:11

I had an interesting moment when I happened to come across a friend’s note to me where she said.

“…resting in God, you will be able to get hurt and still care more about the other person than your own pain.”  I read that while fuming about an offense I was holding onto. It took me right back to one of the messages of Moses and turned my heart. 

From Moses’ life we learn that

• after failure in trying to help others on his own
• after running for his life
• after surrendering to God when he felt entirely inadequate for what God was asking
• after leaving his comfortable, peaceful life on the side of the mountain

Moses was accused, offended, fed up, wounded by God’s people and felt his stinging weakness.

That’s when God brought others around him and Moses persevered in the dry, barren wilderness where all depended on God. (Numbers 11) But not without some soul searching.

I found an offense lingering in my soul taking up space, keeping me from rest and freedom to relate with joy and care toward others. I don’t want to live like that! I remembered (as Michael Hyatt says):

Offenses are inevitable, often unintentional, they can be good for us (to look at ourselves) and holding onto them is a choice.

I chose, after some wrestling, to let it go into God’s hands and see what I can learn from it. I’m already seeing how self-focused the reaction was and feeling the freedom of a whole new perspective. Will you stop long enough to consider:

Is there anything lingering in your soul taking up space?

Some questions to help with that: What am I anxious about?  What makes me feel discontent?  What could be some reasons for lack of joy and freedom in me?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.